Fuhr Figures That One Duck Is Better Than Two

St. Louis goaltender Grant Fuhr said he felt “fortunate” to see Teemu Selanne on a breakaway midway through the third period.

Fortunate?

Fuhr was serious. He figured things could have been worse. Selanne could have waited a moment, allowed Paul Kariya to join him and turned a one-goal lead for the St. Louis Blues into a tie.

And as Selanne zoomed in alone, Fuhr remembered the Mighty Duck winger likes to go to his backhand on breakaways.

Good thing Fuhr hadn’t seen Sunday’s Duck-Detroit Red Wings game. In a similar situation, Selanne slipped a point-blank wrist shot though Mike Vernon’s pads for the Ducks’ first goal in a 3-1 victory over the Red Wings.

This time, however, Fuhr’s hunch was right.

Selanne faked once, moved to his backhand and was stopped cold when Fuhr stuck out his right pad.

St. Louis then had to survive one more Duck near-miss when referee Rob Shick wiped out Steve Rucchin’s apparent goal with 7:19 left in the third period.

Other than those two chances, the Ducks managed few offensive threats against Fuhr in the third period and the Blues held on for a 3-2 victory Wednesday at the Pond.

Well-stocked with snipers, the Blues have been winning with defense and goaltending.

“We’ve been sound in our own end,” Fuhr said after the Blues won for the seventh time in their past nine games. “We’ve got enough guys who can score enough to get four goals a night.”

Well, the Blues fell one goal short against the Ducks, but there was nothing wrong with a stingy defense that held Selanne and Kariya without a goal. Selanne had only two shots on goal, including the breakaway. Kariya, averaging almost seven shots per game, had one.

“We knew coming into the game we had to stop those two guys,” said Brett Hull, who scored his 496th career goal. “Grant made the great save in the third [on Selanne] and came up big a couple of other times.”

Fuhr didn’t have much chance on goals by Rucchin, in the first period, and Jari Kurri, in the second. But the Blues countered quickly, then took the lead for good on Robert Petrovicky’s goal at the 8:34 mark of the third.

St. Louis then turned the game over to its defense and Fuhr made the saves when he had to. Stopping Selanne, who had a nine-game point streak ended, was the biggest of all.

“I thought it was kind of fortunate,” Fuhr said when asked what he was thinking when Selanne broke in alone. “It could have been a two-on-one and that would have been a lot worse.

“He seems to go to his backhand an awful lot on his breakaways. I didn’t look for anything. I just knew nine times out of 10 he’ll go backhand.”

The Ducks had another great chance for a tying goal when Fuhr failed to cleanly handle Darren Van Impe’s slap shot from the left face-off circle. Fuhr covered the puck with his glove, and Shick’s whistle blew an instant before Rucchin slammed the puck into the net.

Later, Fuhr was unfazed about the play.

“Once you hear the whistle, you don’t care where the puck goes after that,” he said.